how to become more memorable (and sell more things)

Summary

my wife Emily told me a directions-style story once that I still remember years later. that’s the power of story. you forget facts. you don’t forget the time the dog stole the sandwich. business runs on the same wiring.

1. people don’t remember features. they don’t remember bullet points. they remember stories. if you want your business to be memorable, you have to be able to tell a story about it.

2. the framework. backstory (where the character was before). external struggle (what they were fighting). internal struggle (what they were fighting in themselves). epiphany (the moment something clicked). transformation (where they ended up). every memorable story has these.

3. practice with your own story. start with how you got to where you are now. write it down using the framework. don’t try to be profound. just be specific. specifics are what make stories sticky.

4. then apply the same structure to your customer’s story. they’re the hero, you’re the guide. their transformation is what they’re paying for. tell that story everywhere.

if you can tell stories, you can sell, lead, and connect. if you can’t, you’ll always sound like a brochure. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the power of storytelling in personal and business contexts

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How do we become more memorable? And how do we tell better stories? And why does that even matter? How can that help you as a human or your business? This is the Better Human Business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon.

And I’ll never forget Emily and I, my wife, we met in college. And just so happens that we met in college that was five hours from our hometown. But we both had a hometown that was only about 20, 30 minutes away from each other, which is awesome. So when we came home for Christmas or summer, we were able to still see each other over these holiday breaks.

a personal anecdote illustrating the memorable impact of storytelling

And I’ll never forget the first time she had come over to my house. And she was like, well, let me show you where I live. And so we started to drive out to her house as her parents’ house, obviously. And she lived in a more rural area at the time. And there were a lot of turns and like directions to get there.

And this was before, let’s just plug it into your GPS and get there. So just showing my age a little bit. So as she was taking me, what she ended up doing on the journey, on the ride from my house to her house, like I said, it’s about 20, 30 minute drive, was she had ended up telling me a story at all of the critical points.

Now I don’t think that she was doing this intentionally, but it did happen. So anytime there was like a big turn, she had spent some time living there. She had a story about a house that burned down over here and a guy who fixed up cars over there, just all these like little stories. And then I remember the first time I was driving from my house to her house.

daily reflections on the importance of storytelling in effective communication

And I was like, I’m not sure I can remember because there’s like 47 turns and like back roads and all this stuff. It’s like kind of hard to get to. And I was like, well, I know how to get started. So I started to go towards her house. And what clicked with me every time I would get to a familiar place where I wasn’t a hundred percent sure if it was right, left, straight, whatever, I would remember the story that she told.

She would tell us, she had these stories. And every time I’d remember the story, I’m like, oh yeah, house burned down here. I take a left. That’s what we did, you know. And that is the first time I realized the true importance and impact of storytelling. Because if she was just like, I will show you.

And she was just like right turn here, left turn there, go straight at this four-way stop. Another left turn there, right turn there. I don’t think I would have remembered it. But because there was a story involved, that’s how human beings work. We work when we hear a story. Our brains work better.

step-by-step guide to constructing a story that resonates and retains

So today what I want to give you is a framework for telling a good story. And I will try and tell a story in this framework as I’m giving you the framework. So if you actually want to utilize this, it might require you getting out a notepad and paper and I’ll tell you what I’m doing it. And if you follow every single step, you will have a good story at the end of it for whatever you want to do.

But here’s the deal. If you sell something, if you market, if you want to do advertising, write emails, if you want to speak to current customers, clients, potential clients, customers, tell stories. That should be your biggest takeaway from here. Whether you suck at telling stories or not, tell stories.

It will be memorable. Tell a story about the time you hurt your ankle and this is the process you went through. Or tell the story of another client or patient or somebody that you had. Tell the stories that are true. That’s what people will remember. They won’t remember all the features and benefits of your program or your membership.

applying the storytelling framework to a personal narrative about starting a blog

They might remember the cost because that’s going to be the biggest hurdle they have to get over. But other than that, if you’re like, oh yeah, we got a cool app and you can text message me anytime. That is so easily forgettable. But the story you tell that encapsulates that thing that you were trying to sell, the way you communicate, that will be remembered and it will be remembered for a long time and it will even make people want to work with you because they can now relate to you through a story.

So I’m going to tell a story about how I started a blog to start a living. As I do it, I’m going to tell you what I’m doing and I’m just going to give a quick one or two sentences that I tell the story. So the first thing you want to do when you’re telling a story is someone needs to know your backstory that gives us an invested interest in your journey, okay?

So that’s the first thing. So I might say something like this if I’m talking about how I started a blog and that turned into all I do today, companies and all this other kind of stuff. I can say, I just wanted to make a couple extra hundred dollars per month to support my family and to get out of debt.

the transformation achieved through storytelling and its effects on personal growth and business success

I didn’t really know what I was going to do and so I, you know, I really wanted to start a blog. You know, we were just struggling financially. I need that 500 extra dollars per month and that’s just where my family’s at, okay? Next part of the story is what is it that you want to accomplish? I kind of already hit on that but then I would go further into the story like, well, I really want to kind of marry my passion for fitness with making money somehow, not necessarily direct personal training but I want to make an additional 500 dollars a month and I want to do that with my greatest passion in the world which is fitness.

Now next, I need an external struggle and then I need an internal struggle. So what I might say is my external struggle, external struggles are things like outside of your control like time or money. So then I could say, okay, well, I want to start down this journey but I don’t have very much time.

I’m full time in the military. I work 12 plus hour days every single day. I really don’t have the time for any kind of side hustle or side gig, external struggle. Now I’m going to internal struggle. Not only that, I don’t know if anybody will listen to me. I don’t have a lot of experience in the fitness industry.

conclusion: encouraging listeners to harness the power of storytelling to become more engaging and effective communicators

All I have is this passion. I do a lot of reading and research but I’m not sure anyone will take me seriously in the fitness industry at all if I were to start writing or creating content. So you see how I’ve done the external struggle. I don’t have time. Internal struggle, I don’t have the confidence.

Next answer the question, what was the wall or problem you hit with your current opportunity that started you on this new journey? Well for me in blogging, what I realized was that my income was kind of fixed with whatever I wanted to do. I’m in all this debt. I wanted to earn extra money but being in the military, you can’t go ask for a raise.

There’s no real way to get more money to get out of debt faster so I kind of have to take that into my own hands. So what I realized was there was no one coming to save me. That’s where I hit the wall. There was no extra income coming anywhere else. If I wanted to get out of debt, if I wanted this extra $500 per month, it was on me.

Now the next part of the story would be, what was the epiphany you experienced in the new opportunity you discovered? When I realized it was completely up to me that no one’s going to save me and I am in the driver’s seat, I turned to blogging because I can write. I like to write. I realized that if I write about fitness, there might be some sort of opportunity, some sort of door that opens that leads me to income, whether that’s through advertising or selling programs or something.

Maybe someone will hire me to write and do these things. That’s ultimately what I discovered. Now the next question you answered to continue down the story and we are nearing completion here is, what was the plan you created to achieve your desire? Well like I said I didn’t have a lot of time or confidence so my main plan was that I was just going to commit.

I had three years left on active duty and the only thing I decided to commit to is that I was going to blog and write about fitness every single week. I would publish an article of minimum 1,000 to 2,000 words, well researched, well written every single week for three years. That was my plan. Now the next question to answer is, what conflict did you experience along the way?

Well the conflict I experienced was one being active duty military. It was just very hard to find again external struggle at the time to actually do these things. I had very few people who actually believed in me or encouraged me and very few people who wanted to pay for writing services or even commit to online programming before it was popular.

Lots of conflicts along the way. Now we have two more here. The next one is, what was the end result? Well the end result was that I committed to three years of writing and that writing turned into programs. That turned into an audience that I built. That turned into building trust with other people in the industry and so I was able to sell programs.

Selling programs gained me experience in business. Experience in business led to me consulting, led to business partnerships, led to other business opportunities. To now over the last 10 years I’ve been a very successful entrepreneur all because I decided to consistently write with not knowing what direction I was going to go at all.

Not only did I achieve that $500 a month pretty fast, I far surpassed even my wildest imagination of what was possible from a time freedom and financial freedom standpoint. Now the last thing you do in a story is, what was the transformation you experienced? Well the reason the Better Human Business podcast even exists to finish out my story is that what I realized over doing this in those three years and over the last decade plus is that if I want to grow my business, if I want to get better at something, I need to improve myself.

The biggest transformation I experienced was not earning more money, it was not gaining more time freedom. It was becoming a better version of myself because as I became a better father, a better husband, as I did these things, my business got better, my mindset got better, I got more consistent in my training, more consistent in my business, more consistent in my writing.

I became a new person. The person I started with when I first started blogging, he does not exist anymore. I am completely new. Now I have told you a legitimate story about how I started in the online business world with blogging. Very quickly I went through what I wanted to accomplish, internal struggles, external struggles, problems, all these kind of things, what I desired.

If you go through this podcast and you just stop and write down everything when I said, hey this is the next thing you need to do, next question you need to answer, you will now have a framework for telling a story. And when I have people do this, most of them come at me and say, I don’t really feel like I have any stories.

And you probably don’t, because you’ve never written them down. Everyone has a story, everyone has a story worth telling, every single person. But until you’ve ever written down your story, you don’t have a story to tell. Your stories are boring, they’re not relatable, they don’t make people want to be friends with you or listen to your content or listen to a sales pitch.

You need to actually take the time to sit down and write the story, because I guarantee you are an incredibly interesting and amazing human being who has tons of stories, and you could write hundreds of these in this format and have one prepared for creating your content, for having a sales conversation, for email marketing, for anything and everything.

And I promise you, if you start actually telling and utilizing your story in your business, your business will grow, and not only that, on the personal side, people will find you more interesting. But to have any stories to tell, you’re going to have to follow a framework, you’re going to have to write things down, you’re going to have to re-listen to this podcast, go step by step, and guess what?

You’re going to have to try harder.